Brad Pitt, 'Killing Them Softly' take aim at crime genre

Crime films are not one-size-fits-all affairs. If you've seen one, you haven't seen them all. It only seems you have because certain elements are recurring: all-male settings filled with violence and extreme characters who are hard-boiled or Runyonesque.

Crime still pays today, but it takes more than generic felonious acts and heinous characters to move the needle.

After "Pulp Fiction," the multiplex overflowed with quick-and-dirty copycats. But the genre has since shown it can expand or contract to accommodate an array of imaginations and creative visions. There are tall tales and small tales, from the black comedy of "Seven Psychopaths" to the Cockney swagger of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

"Killing Them Softly" is a little bit of all of this. While rooted in film noir, it is tethered to a tenuous bit of heightened reality that causes it to resemble a used textbook in which all the important parts have already been underlined.

Writer-director Andrew Dominik imagines his subculture of junkies, mobsters and hitmen dancing to the recessionary drumbeat in 2008 at the start of the financial collapse. While going about their brutal business, the background noise - in cars and bars - is TV and radio reports of the fiscal collapse.

Hard to tell what this means. Hitmen are people too? Or that some people rob you with a gun and others with a fountain pen?

In any case, it's hard to believe wiseguys are that interested in current events.

Brad Pitt plays a hitman hired by a bureaucratic syndicate middleman, played with effortless banality by the versatile Richard Jenkins, to settle the score when a mob card game, run by Ray Liotta, is robbed by junkies. Pitt is a businesslike, efficient killer. But he is also sensitive. He kills his victims softly, from a distance.

Since the junkies who are his quarry are predictable, it's easy to find them. But the job is complicated by a syndicate unwilling to get blood on its hands and another hitman gone rogue.

The nodding and delusional junkies - Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, as the belligerent dognapper of the pair - allow Dominik to bring a "Trainspotting" vibe to the proceedings. Coincidentally, "Seven Psychopaths" also had a dognapping subplot.

Numerous scenes are skillfully if brutally choreographed, including an elaborate beating in the rain, a tense backroom robbery of a group of armed men and Pitt's encounters with a volatile James Gandolfini. Pitt played a more sympathetic version of a similar character in the mournful "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," also directed by New Zealand native Dominik, whose portrait of the American West drew from his own country's frontier experience.

And while he may have captured something of outlaw culture in "Killing Them Softly," Dominik's portrait of America seems myopic, cynical and coldblooded.